Sienna and Sierra, A Tale of Twin Sisters with Unique Journeys

Sometimes when we go out in the public, people would think she's my mom and not my twin

When we go to the bar, people think I'm eight, even though I'm 23

First off, I didn't even realize that I was having twins until about six weeks before

they were born. They said, well, you're having twins, but you need to quickly get over that because

we need to talk about baby B. They knew that she had dandy walker in utero, so they could see that she was missing a portion

of her brain, and then they could see that she was a lot smaller as well

Sienna stayed in the NICU for 108 days, and then she went into the hospital a lot over

the next several years of her life. It was a long fight to find out what kind of dwarfism she had or that she had dwarfism

in general. She did have a hole in her heart, and they thought perhaps that was why she was so small

And then they gave her a feeding tube in her stomach because they thought maybe she wasn't

eating enough, and so it wasn't until she was about six, right

I think. Six or seven, yeah. That we discovered that she had dwarfism

It was more or less like a relief because now that we know what it is, we know what

we need to do in order to better her life. Sienna is a spitfire

Yeah, I always say I'm like a Scyther or a Chihuahua, but personally, I'm like a Wartwiler

For me, the emotional side of things was a little challenging because Sienna would, having

an identical twin who is, you know, average height, she would see what she was missing

So she could see what her life would have been like because she would say, you know

why is Sierra getting to live the life I want to live? It's affected our relationship in the sense that we have to be very communicative and

we have to be very, really, we can't be jealous of anything because we do have very different lives

And we have different experiences. Yeah, very different experiences. We're on a different road path

It's neat to, you know, from a dad's standpoint to see that they are twins and that they have

such a tight relationship and yet they are still really so different, not just because

of their height